confluence user session timeout

[Ronald de Vries]

All,

Despite the various posts that show or refer to pages where user session time out is documented, I still have issues in my Confluence 4.2.8 system where my user session times out in 15 minutes.

I checked all the posts and atlassian docs, and there is mention of 300 minutes etc. However, this is not the behavior I see in Confluence, and changing the 300 value in web.xml for example does nothing to change the user session timeout time of 15 minutes.

Atlassians, or fellow Answers users, can you spend some quality time on documenting this correctly with information that actually makes the change work? We need to know how to change the user session timeout from the current 15m to something more. And yes, I've tried some examples (please also do this) and let me know why web.xml 300 does not mean 15min user session timeout, or what I need to set to change the 15min user session time out to say 30 or 45 min? (and in this case, what the 300 means in session-config in web.xml?

We're losing a lot of page edits in Confluence and are facing somewhat of a revolt in the user community about lost content and wasted time using Confluence.

[Adam Laskowski · Accepted solution]

In my experience, the most common hangup that cause session-timeouts not to be respected is that you set your session-timeout in the <confluence-install>conf/web.xml instead of the <confluence-install>/confluence/WEB-INF/web.xml. If you set the config in the Tomcat XML in the conf directory, the setting will be overridden by Confluence's webapp XML.

[Andrew Morin]

I am using 4.0 so not sure if it changed but the session timeout is in minutes in the web.xml. I usually set it to 120 and don't have that issue. Obviously remember to restart Confluence after you make the update...adding this as a comment and not an answer as our versions are pretty different..

<!-- ==================== Default Session Configuration ================= -->

<!-- You can set the default session timeout (in minutes) for all newly -->

<!-- created sessions by modifying the value below. -->

<session-config>

<session-timeout>120</session-timeout>

</session-config>